NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

I first traveled to the United Nations to testify in 2007. I testified along with two other Marie Auyong and Rima Miles before the Fourth Committee on the situation in Guam. We came in the wake of a larger delegation the year before which featured Victoria Leon Guerrero, Julian Aguon, Sabina Perez, Fanai Castro, Tiffany Lacsado and Kerri Ann Borja. That trip represented a big moment in sort of post-nation Chamoru/Angel Santos activism in Guam and the diaspora. The trip first came from a conference in San Diego that I along with a few others had organized in April 2006 about decolonization and Chamoru issues. It was, as far as any of us could tell, the first of its kind in the diaspora. The gathering of so many critical and conscious Chamorus in one place led to a great number of things, one of which was a period of new engagement around the United Nations. Chamorus had been traveling on and off to the UN since 1982. There were high points, usually when the Government of Guam wanted

The United Nations is a strange beast in Guam in turns of its place in the movement for decolonization. Prior to the failure of Commonwealth in 1997, the UN was always a quiet force in the background, but held little authority or played a very minor role in the consistency of arguments or political positions. Even when Chamorro activists were successful in getting people on Guam to recognize the Chamorro people as being indigenous, even though activists were successful in defeating a Constitutional movement on Guam, which would have trapped the island within an American framework, and both of these things rely heavily on discourses which find great potency in the UN and its history, they were not strongly international movements. The UN itself, although still a quiet presence on Guam, is still interpreted in a very American framework, and so regardless of how Guam's relationship to the UN is fundamentally different (it is a non-self-governing territory), people here tend to see

As part of my collaboration with the Learn Chamorro project I wrote up the following bio for myself. But as the project, led by Troy Aguon is aimed at teaching Chamorro and finding innovative ways to revive the language around us in our lives, I decided to write my biography in Chamorro. Si Michael Lujan Bevacqua, ginnen i familian Kabesa yan Bittot giya Guahan. Nietun Si Tun Jack Lujan i Sainan Menhalom na Herreron Chamorro, ya fina’na’na’gue gui’ as guiya gi kustumbren Herrero desde 2008 asta 2015. I inaligao-ña siha mismo put taimanu na macolonize i Chamorro, ya hafa taimanu na siña ta “decolonize” maisa hit. Para “decolonization” ti manaliligao ha’ gi bandan pulitikåt ha’, lao gi banda linenguahi yan kinettura lokkue’. Gi 2006 ha ayuda umotgånisa i konferensia Famoksaiyan: Decolonizing Chamorro Histories, Identities and Future giya San Diego. Este i fine’nina na konferensia taiguini masusedi gi halom i Chamorron diaspora. Gi 2011 ha ayuda Si Victoria Leon Gue

One of the high points of my life was the conference Famoksaiyan: Decolonizing Chamorro Histories, Identities and Futures. It was a gathering, the first of its kind, which I helped organize in San Diego in 2006. Chamorros living in the United States have for long held gatherings and formed organizations to keep their cultural and family ties. These organizations would focus around shared village ties or the Chamorro calendar, and so each year there are village patron saint fiestas and Liberation Day events from California to Nebraska to Florida. While these gatherings would be fun and help families keep their ties even across great distances, they were hardly political affairs. They were meant to celebrate Chamorros as a social, cultural and religious group, and so more serious topics affecting Chamorros weren’t usually discussed. Myself and several other Chamorros attending college in the states decided that we wanted to create a space where Chamorros, esp

As I already mentioned in an earlier post on the second to the last day of my trip to Okinawa our hosts held a small party in our honor. The meeting was held in a cafe which will soon be open owned by Midori Teruya. Midori was kind enough to escort Ed Alvarez and myself around Naha and Ginowan on our last day in Okinawa, and took us to several locations including a mall for some last minute shopping, an independent movie theater to watch the film Standing Army, and the Sakima Art Museum . Over our ten days in Okinawa we spent alot of time at Midori's Cafe and the Okinawan language school on the floor above. The school is free for the public and is just getting started. I took some pictures, video and notes while I sat through one of their sessions and will hopefully we writing about it later. As the Chamorro and Okinawan language are in similar not too healthy states, that was something that I had constantly discussed with people. While we were sitting at the cafe sampling

After attending two international conferences in Japan, the initial luster has faded a little bit. The conferences are still impressive, but I am starting to see their limitations, but also the ways the organizers are attempting to overcome them. When I attended the 2010 World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, I was completely blown away. Nina'manman yu' ni' i lini'e'-hu guihi. Compared to conferences that I have organized in both Guam and California around similar issues, the level of attention and precision at this conference, (which by the way lasted for more than a week) was incomparable. Kalang taiparehu este. There were more than 100 overseas delegates, and in Hiroshima over 7,000 conference attendees (more than 2,000 in Nagasaki). And despite this logistical nightmare, almost everything started on time and finished on time. Compare this to the three Famoksaiyan conferences that I helped organize in San Diego and the Bay Area California in 2006

Kao hoben yu’? Hekkua’. Anggen un kompara ham yan i manestudiante-ku siha, ahe’. Esta bihu yu’. Lao kao hohoben ha’ yu’? Lao yanggen un kompara ham yan i otro na manactivists siha giya Guahan, hunggan hohoben ha’ yu’. The conference in Okinawa is an Asia-Pacific conference, but in the International Forum, 10% of the delegates come from the Pacific. In the general Japan Peace Conference around 0.01% of the delegates come from the Pacific. We were incredibly small in terms of presence, yet we had a huge impact on the proceedings. Part of the reason why the Japanese were impressed and enamored with us is because or our youth. Looking around the conference, you might imagine that the average age of a peace-activist in Japan is somewhere around 50. This conference many many times felt like a Japanese version of the movie Cocoon . It was surreal to see so many friendly old Japanese men, talking about peace and love in such ways that you might expect them to be a hippie girl working

For the past few weeks I've helped organize two public forums at UOG's CLASS Lecture Hall, both of which were completely packed. A forum held in September featuring David Vine talking about Diego Garcia and Leevin Camacho talking about the Pagat lawsuit was attended by well over 200 people. The same was true for a forum on political decolonization featuring expert on the existing Non-Self-Governing Territories Carlyle Corbin from the Virgin Islands and Guam's own human rights attorney Julian Aguon. In both cases, almost every seat was packed, with some lined up watching along the lecture hall's walls. Granted, a good number of those in attendance were students who were there as part of class, but it was still inspiring to see so many people in a single place to learn about issues such as base displacement and decolonization. While Carlyle Corbin was here last month he mentioned how impressed he was with the level of discourse on Guam in terms of decolonization. Compar

A few months back I started up a Tumblr in hopes of exploring the angsty, curious teenage girl inside of me (j/k). In truth, I have no idea what the teenage girl inside of me is like, we don't talk very much, sina gof ekpe gui' lao ti siguru yu', hassan na kumuentos ham. Actually I did think about getting a Tumblr long ago, but it was precisely the abundance of angsty, curious pre-teen and teenage girls on there which made me shy away. Would getting a Tumblr mark me in a social-virutal way that I wasn't expecting? I don't know how cool or uncool Blogger is, but I'm certain that having a Tumblr is cooler, but would it be the right kind of cool? Esta meggai na blogs-hu siha, lao ti mangcool siha. Ya mungga yu' mama'tinas nuebu ya para bai hu makase' ta'lo. I asked my younger sister Alina who is a living, breathing angsty teenage girl what she thought about Tumblr and her response was, "What's that?" So that's when I decided it

Courtesy of Famoksaiyan Friends: From We Are Guåhan: DoD Refuses Public Involvement in Additional Firing Range Complex Studies June 15, 2011 Eight (8) months after making its Record of Decision (“ROD”), DoD has asked the District Court of Hawaii for a “voluntary remand” to do additional studies on the firing ranges that DoD has planned on building at Pågat Village and the surrounding area. DoD has refused to allow for any public input or participation in these new studies. DoD’s request to add more information to its previous studies comes weeks after an e-mail from JGPO about DoD’s plans for Pågat Village was publicly released. In the e-mail, which was sent seven days after DoD issued its ROD, Major General Bice of JGPO wrote to several high ranking DoD officials that DoD “can get all of the land eventually, including an SDZ [Surface Danger Zone] over Pagat; we have to be patient and build trust with the community first.” The e-mail from JGPO also said that DoD could get P

While I was in San Diego attending graduate school I worked with alot of the Chamorro community out there, in particular the non-profit group CHELU Inc. CHELU stands for Chamorro Hands in Education Links Unity and it was created to support the Chamorro people and the maintenance of their health, their language and their heritage. I served briefly as a board member to CHELU, during which time I helped write for them a $100,000 ANA or Administration of Native Americans Grant, to study the state of the Chamorro language in San Diego county, which hosts the largest population of Chamorros anywhere outside of the Marianas. The grant was called Tungo' i Estao i Fino'-ta , and despite the group being rejected for the same grant the year earlier, with my help we received it and the study was conducted. When I helped organize three Famoksaiyan conferences in San Diego and the Bay Area, many Guam clubs or Chamorro groups were not supportive and sometimes openly hostile of what we were